So apparently Rana can’t speak for herself, and Wally has to clear this with her mom, because she’s eight years old and not a grad student. Wait, that’s not right.

I mean, why would Becky object? It’s the first time in like ten years Wally’s even been aware he has a daughter. Becky’s got to seize that moment while she can. And this will allow her and John to have a romantic Thanksgiving alone. Who am I kidding, of course it would be the two of them and Crazy Harry.

And it’s one thing for an individual to say that they personally are putting on the “freshman fifteen” (grad school fifteen is just lame and continues the long Batiukian tradition of thinking just switching two words is enough to be hilarious). It’s another thing for Becky to “joke” about this totally behind Rana’s back to her dad. It just comes off like complaining about her getting fat, which is laughable, but totally in line with the general mean-spirited nature of Batiuk’s strips.

Wow, what a shitty joke. Not just because it’s mean-spirited or blindingly stupid, which it is, but because it just plain blows. It’s like he suddenly realized “college” was integral to this story or something, in spite of the fact that this thing stopped being “about” anything weeks ago. The whole Wally/Rana relationship has become incredibly weird and murky all of a sudden, meanwhile he’s busily shoehorning terrible college-centric references in there out of nowhere. Small wonder he’s widely considered to be the world’s worst living writer. If I ever posted a joke as bad as this one on SoSF I’d retire forever in shame and self-loathing and so would you.

The “Beck” thing is weird to me. Like, is “Becky” that much harder to say? I don’t recall her ever being referred to as “Beck” before. Also, are her and Wally on close enough terms anymore for him to call her something like that? Like, he didn’t even know their daughter was going to the same school as him, or was Muslim.

I don’t know what’s worse: the clumsy, ill-thought out Batiukese, the bricks, the smirking or my impending feeling of dread because I fear that ham will magically be what they eat for Givethanksing forever now.

Batiuk is LAZY. He’s got that group drawing on his blog that is about ten years out of date. You’d think an “award-winning” cartoonist would have an up to date rendering of his characters, but it must be too much work for him. Why can’t ISIS show Batiuk the same kind of initiative they did with Charlie Hebdo?

On his blog a little while back, he showed pictures from some talk he gave about the strip. The only two pictures of his work he used were the same two group pictures from the time jump that you see right when you go to his webpage.

I think it would be hilarious if Wally, Rana et al show up at Funky’s house on Thanksgiving and it turns out they’re in Florida with her mother. I can just see a week’s worth of strips of Wally et al sitting forlornly on the stoop.

Two more hilarious things from his blog:
1. “My dream is to one day produce a Funky family tree (or family jungle) for the website. The thing about dreams is that they don’t always come true, but I haven’t quite given up on this one just yet. Fingers crossed.” – Guy, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, since these are your characters you created. You should be able to do it in like an afternoon. And honestly, how many relatives does Funky have?
2. “Afgansitan”

“1. “My dream is to one day produce a Funky family tree (or family jungle) for the website. The thing about dreams is that they don’t always come true, but I haven’t quite given up on this one just yet.”

Jeez louise that is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever read. It’s not like his goal is to hike the Appalachian Trail at eighty in the dead of winter, no it’s something that might take a hour or so a day for a few weeks. I don’t know if he’s admitting his incompetence or laziness to his craft. In either case it’s just sad that he thinks of himself as a professional c̶a̶r̶t̶o̶o̶n̶i̶s̶t̶ serial art writer.

This is such a stupid misunderstanding of the “Freshman Fifteen” and what it means.

The “Freshman Fifteen” refers to the fifteen pounds that first-year college students typically gain because for most of them they’re off on their own and have to take care of their own dietary needs for the first time in their lives. They also generally have easy access to food in dining halls and often it’s prepaid at the start of the semester/quad. It’s ripe for overeating and bad diet.

Grad students, on the other hand, are completely on the other end of the spectrum. They’ve usually been on their own taking care of themselves and their dietary needs for years by the time they enter grad school. (And there’s no indication that Rana’s been living at home since she graduated from high school in 2012) They don’t have easy access to dining halls because they usually don’t live on campus and they generally don’t have their meals paid for at the start of the semester/quad. And they also frequently don’t have a whole lot of money so they can’t waste what they have on extra food for overeating or going out to eat. It’s not a situation where you gain weight as a matter of course.